The New Expatriates: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals

by Anne-Meike Fechter (Editor), Katie Walsh (Editor)

Overview

While scholarship on migration has been thriving for decades, little attention has been paid to professionals from Europe and America who move temporarily to destinations beyond ‘the West’. Such migrants are marginalised and depoliticised by debates on immigration policy, and thus there is an urgent need to develop nuanced understanding of these more privileged movements. In many ways, these are the modern-day equivalents of colonial settlers and expatriates, yet the continuities in their migration practices have rarely been considered.

The New Expatriates advances our understanding of contemporary mobile professionals by engaging with postcolonial theories of race, culture and identity. The volume brings together authors and research from across a wide range of disciplines, seeking to evaluate the significance of the past in shaping contemporary expatriate mobilities and highlighting postcolonial continuities in relation to people, practices and imaginations. Acknowledging the resonances across a range of geographical sites in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the chapters consider the particularity of postcolonial contexts, while enabling comparative perspectives. A focus on race and culture is often obscured by assumptions about class, occupation and skill, but this volume explicitly examines the way in which whiteness and imperial relationships continue to shape the migration experiences of Euro-American skilled migrants as they seek out new places to live and work.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135701031
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
File size:	635 KB

About the Author

Anne-Meike Fechter is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Transnational Lives: Expatriates in Indonesia (2007). Her current research focuses on aid workers as mobile professionals.

Katie Walsh is affiliated with the Sussex Centre for Migration Research as a lecturer in human geography in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Her ethnographic research on British migrants in Dubai explores transnational belonging and identities, with an emphasis on embodiment, emotion, intimacy, and materialities.

Table of Contents

Foreword Alan Lester 1. Examining ‘Expatriate’ Continuities: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals Anne-Meike Fechter and Katie Walsh 2. ‘New Shanghailanders’ or ‘New Shanghainese’: Western Expatriates’ Narratives of Emplacement in Shanghai James Farrer 3. ‘Realising the Self and Developing the African’: German Immigrants in Namibia Heidi Armbruster 4. Work, Identity and Change? Post/Colonial Encounters in Hong Kong Pauline Leonard 5. Institutionalising the Colonial Imagination: Chinese Middlemen and the Transnational Corporate Office in Jakarta, Indonesia William H. Leggett 6. Gender, Empire, Global Capitalism: Colonial and Corporate Expatriate Wives Anne-Meike Fechter 7. A Postcolonial Imagination? Westerners Searching for Authenticity in India Mari Korpela 8. From ‘Trucial State’ to ‘Postcolonial’ City? The Imaginative Geographies of British Expatriates in Dubai Anne Coles and Katie Walsh 9. ‘They Called Them Communists Then. . ./ What D’You Call ’Em Now?. . ./ Insurgents?’ Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor